Holy Crap!

[Tunnelcat]

Our own Air Farce almost nuked a U.S. city in 1961 by accident! Goldsboro, NC was one little switch away from oblivion.

http://news.yahoo.com/us-nearly-detonat ... 56862.html

[Duper]

heh, well, for starters, it wasn't armed. it also dropped into the bay. I read about this a couple of months ago. They spent a couple of months looking for the bomb but couldn't find it.

I think there's a wiki entry on it/

[Tunnelcat]

Oh, it was closer to going off than you think. It was only one low voltage switch electrical jolt away from going off while those bombs parachuted to earth. The safety mechanism was definitely not adequate for carrying around in an aircraft over U.S. soil. Scary.

http://www.businessinsider.com/us-nearl ... -nc-2013-9

The bombs fell to Earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: Its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.....

....But in the newly-published document, a senior engineer in the Sandia national laboratories responsible for the mechanical safety of nuclear weapons concludes that "one simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe."

Writing eight years after the accident, Parker F Jones found that the bombs that dropped over North Carolina, just three days after John F Kennedy made his inaugural address as president, were inadequate in their safety controls and that the final switch that prevented disaster could easily have been shorted by an electrical jolt, leading to a nuclear burst. "It would have been bad news — in spades," he wrote.

[Tunnelcat]

heh, well, for starters, it wasn't armed. it also dropped into the bay. I read about this a couple of months ago. They spent a couple of months looking for the bomb but couldn't find it.

I think there's a wiki entry on it/

Not the same incident. This was one of 2 bombs that fell actually hit the ground. One bomb actually deployed it's parachute and activated 3 out of 4 of it's arming mechanisms before it hit the ground. One little cheap switch prevented a detonation. The other bomb disintegrated upon impact.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09 ... veals?lite

This hasn't been the only "accident". There's been at least 32 Pentagon acknowledged "official broken arrows", but there may be around 1200 nuclear weapons involved in incidents that occurred between 1950 and 1968. It sounds like we're lucky we didn't nuke ourselves during the Cold War.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-5 ... a-in-1961/

[vision]

No Nukes. Make Love Not War.

[Sergeant Thorne]

How about, Make Sense Not War?